HHhH Бине Лоран

1

Gabk—that’s his name—really did exist. Lying alone on a little iron bed, did he hear, from outside, beyond the shutters of a darkened apartment, the unmistakable creaking of the Prague tramways? I want to believe so. I know Prague well, so I can imagine the tram’s number (but perhaps it’s changed?), its route, and the place where Gabk waits, thinking and listening. We are at the corner of Vyehradsk and Trojick. The number 18 tram (or the number 22) has stopped in front of the Botanical Gardens. We are, most important, in 1942. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera implies that he feels a bit ashamed at having to name his characters. And although this shame is hardly perceptible in his novels, which are full of Tomes, Tominas, and Terezas, we can intuit the obvious meaning: what could be more vulgar than to arbitrarily give—from a childish desire for verisimilitude or, at best, mere convenience—an invented name to an invented character? In my opinion, Kundera should have gone further: what could be more vulgar than an invented character?

So, Gabk existed, and it was to this name that he answered (although not always). His story is as true as it is extraordinary. He and his comrades are, in my eyes, the authors of one of the greatest acts of resistance in human history, and without doubt the greatest of the Second World War. For a long time I have wanted to pay tribute to him. For a long time I have seen him, lying in his little room—shutters closed, window open—listening to the creak of the tram (going which way? I don’t know) that stops outside the Botanical Gardens. But if I put this i on paper, as I’m sneakily doing now, that won’t necessarily pay tribute to him. I am reducing this man to the ranks of a vulgar character and his actions to literature: an ignominious transformation, but what else can I do? I don’t want to drag this vision around with me all my life without having tried, at least, to give it some substance. I just hope that, however bright and blinding the veneer of fiction that covers this fabulous story, you will still be able to see through it to the historical reality that lies behind.

2

I don’t remember exactly when my father first told me this story, but I can see him now, in my public-housing bedroom, pronouncing the words “partisans,” “Czechoslovaks,” perhaps “operation,” certainly “assassinate,” and then this date: “1942.” I’d found History of the Gestapo by Jacques Delarue on his bookshelves, and started to read it. Seeing me with this book in my hands, my father had made some passing remarks: he’d mentioned Himmler, the leader of the SS, and then his right-hand man, Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. And he’d told me of a Czechoslovak commando sent by London, and an assassination attempt. He didn’t know the details—and I had no reason to ask for them at the time, as this historic event hadn’t yet taken hold of my imagination. But I had sensed in him that slight excitement he always gets when recounting something he finds striking. I don’t think he was really aware of the importance he gave this anecdote. When I told him recently of my intention to write a book on the subject, all I sensed was polite curiosity without a trace of any particular emotion. But I know that this story has always fascinated him, even if it never made as strong an impression on him as it did on me. So one of the reasons I am embarking on this book is to reciprocate his gift—those few words spoken to an adolescent boy by a father who, at the time, was not yet a history teacher. But who, in a few awkward phrases, knew how to tell it.

The story, I mean. History.

3

When I was still a child, well before the separation of the two countries, I already knew the difference between the Czechs and Slovaks. How? Because of tennis. For example, I knew that Ivan Lendl was Czech while Miroslav Me was Slovak. And if Me the Slovak was a flashier player, more talented and likable than the cold, workmanlike Czech Lendl (who was, all the same, the world number one for 270 weeks—a record he held until Pete Sampras topped him, holding the number one spot for 286 weeks), I had also learned from my father that, during the war, the Slovaks had collaborated while the Czechs had resisted. In my child’s mind, this meant that all Czechs had been resistance fighters and all Slovaks collaborators, as if by nature. Not for a second did I consider the case of France, which called into question such an oversimplification: hadn’t we, the French, both resisted and collaborated? Truth be told, it was only when I learned that Tito was a Croat—so not all Croats had been collaborators, and perhaps not all Serbs had been resistance fighters—that I began to have a clearer understanding of Czechoslovakia’s situation during the war. On one side, there was Bohemia and Moravia (in other words, the current Czech Republic), occupied by the Germans and annexed to the Reich—that is, having the unenviable status of protectorate, and considered part of Greater Germany. On the other side there was the Slovak state, theoretically independent but turned into a satellite by the Nazis. Obviously, this does not presuppose anything about any individual person’s behavior.

4

On arriving in Bratislava in 1996, before going to work as a French teacher in a Slovakian military academy, one of the first things I asked the secretary to the military attach at the embassy (after asking for news of my luggage, which had gone missing near Istanbul) concerned the story of the assassination. I learned the first details of the affair from this man: a warrant officer who had specialized in phone-tapping in Czechoslovakia and, since the end of the Cold War, had been redeployed as a diplomat. First of all, there were two men involved in the attack: a Czech and a Slovak. I was pleased to find out that a representative of my host country had taken part in the operation—and that there really had been Slovak resistance fighters. I didn’t learn much about the operation itself, except that one of the guns had jammed when they shot at Heydrich’s car (and I discovered simultaneously that Hedyrich was in a car at that moment). But it was above all what happened afterward that piqued my curiosity: how the two partisans had taken refuge with their friends in a church, and how the Germans had tried to drown them… A strange story. I wanted details. But the warrant officer didn’t know much more.

5

A little while after arriving in Slovakia, I met a very beautiful young Slovak woman with whom I fell madly in love and went on to have a passionate affair that lasted nearly five years. It was through her that I managed to obtain further information. Firstly, the protagonists’ names: Jozef Gabk and Jan Kubi. Gabk was the Slovak, and Kubi the Czech—apparently you can tell their nationality from their surnames. These two men have become part of the historical landscape: Aurlia, the young woman in question, had learned their names at school, like all the little Czechs and Slovaks of her generation. She knew the broad outline of the story, but not much more than my warrant officer. I had to wait two or three years before I knew for sure what I had always suspected—that this story was more fantastic and intense than the most improbable fiction. And I discovered that almost by chance.

I had rented an apartment for Aurlia in the center of Pragu, between the castle of Vyehrad and Karlovo nmst (Charles Square). From this square runs a street, Resslova ulice, that goes down to the river, where you will find that strange glass building which seems to undulate in the air and which the Czechs call Tanc dm: the dancing house. On Resslova Street—on the right-hand side as you go down—there is a church. And in the church’s wall is a basement window bordered by stone where you can see numerous bullet marks and a plaque mentioning Gabk and Kubi—and Heydrich, whose name is now forever linked with theirs. I had passed this basement window dozens of times without noticing either the bullet marks or the plaque. But one day I stopped and read the words—and realized I had found the church where the parachutists took refuge after the assassination attempt.

I came back with Aurlia at a time when the church was open, and we were able to visit the crypt.

In the crypt, there was everything.

6

There were still fresh traces of the drama that had occurred in this room more than sixty years before: a tunnel dug several yards deep; bullet marks in the walls and the vaulted ceiling. There were also photographs of the parachutists’ faces, with a text written in Czech and in English. There was a traitor’s name and a raincoat. There was a poster of a bag and a bicycle. There was a Sten submachine gun (which jammed at the worst possible moment). All of this was actually in the room. But there was something else here, conjured by the story I read, that existed only in spirit. There were women, there were careless acts, there was London, there was France, there were legionnaires, there was a government in exile, there was a village by the name of Lidice, there was a young lookout called Valk, there was a tram which went by (also at the worst possible moment), there was a death mask, there was a reward of ten million crowns for whoever denounced the gunmen, there were cyanide pills, there were grenades and people to throw them, there were radio transmitters and coded messages, there was a sprained ankle, there was penicillin that could be procured only in England, there was an entire city under the thumb of the man they nicknamed “the Hangman,” there were swastika flags and death’s-head insignias, there were German spies who worked for Britain, there was a black Mercedes with a blown tire, there was a chauffeur and a butcher, there were dignitaries gathered around a coffin, there were policemen bent over corpses, there were terrible reprisals, there was greatness and madness, weakness and betrayal, courage and fear, hope and grief, there were all the human passions brought together in a few square yards, there was war and there was death, there were Jews deported, families massacred, soldiers sacrificed, there was vengeance and political calculation, there was a man who was (among other things) an accomplished fencer and violinist, there was a locksmith who never managed to do his job, there was the spirit of the Resistance engraved forever in these walls, there were traces of the struggle between the forces of life and the forces of death, there was Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, there was all the history of the world contained in a few stones.

There were seven hundred SS guards outside.

7

On the Internet, I discovered the existence of a telefilm, Conspiracy, with Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich. I eagerly ordered the DVD—only five euros, postage and handling included—and it arrived three days later.

Conspiracy is a historical reconstruction of the Wannsee Conference, where, on January 20, 1942, in only a few hours, Heydrich and his assistant Eichmann set down the methods of enforcing the Final Solution. By this time, mass executions had already begun in Poland and the USSR but they had been entrusted to the SS extermination commandos, the Einsatzgruppen, who simply rounded up their victims by the hundreds, sometimes by the thousands, often in a field or a forest, before killing them with submachine guns. The problem with this method was that it tested the executioners’ nerves and harmed the troops’ morale, even those as hardened as the SD or the Gestapo. Himmler himself fainted while attending one of these mass executions. Subsequently, the SS had taken to asphyxiating their victims by cramming them inside trucks and hooking up the exhaust pipe to a length of hose, but the technique remained relatively unsophisticated. After Wannsee, the extermination of the Jews—which Heydrich entrusted to the tender care of his faithful Eichmann—was administered as a logistical, social, and economic project on a very large scale.

Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of Heydrich is quite clever: he manages to combine great affability with brusque authoritarianism, which makes his character highly disturbing. I don’t know how accurate it is—I have not read anywhere that the real Heydrich knew how to show kindness, whether real or faked. But one short scene does a good job of showing his true psychological and historical nature. Two men at the conference are having a private discussion. One confides to the other that he’s heard Heydrich has Jewish origins and asks if he thinks there might be any truth to this. The second man replies venomously: “Why not go and ask him yourself?” His questioner goes pale at the thought. Now, it turns out that a persistent rumor claiming his father was Jewish did in fact pursue Heydrich for many years and that his youth was poisoned by this. Apparently the rumor was unfounded. But let’s be honest, even if that wasn’t the case, Heydrich—as head of the secret services of the Nazi Party and the SS—would have been able to erase all suspect traces in his genealogy without the slightest effort.

This is not the first time that Heydrich has made it to the big screen: in 1943, less than a year after the assassination, Fritz Lang shot a propaganda film enh2d Hangmen Also Die! with a screenplay by Bertolt Brecht. This film recounts the events in a way that is utterly fanciful—Lang didn’t know what had really happened, and even if he had he naturally wouldn’t have wished to risk revealing the truth—but quite ingenious: Heydrich is assassinated by a Czech doctor, a member of the Resistance who takes refuge in the house of a young girl. Then the girl’s father, an academic, is rounded up by the Germans along with other local worthies and threatened with execution if the assassin doesn’t give himself up. The crisis, treated in an extremely dramatic way (thanks to Brecht, presumably), is resolved when the Resistance manages to pin the blame on a traitorous collaborator, whose death ends both the affair and the film. In reality, neither the partisans nor the Czech people got off so lightly.

Fritz Lang chose to represent Heydrich rather crudely as an effeminate pervert, a complete degenerate who carries a riding crop to underline both his ferocity and his depraved morals. It’s true that the real Heydrich was supposed to be a sexual pervert and that he spoke in a falsetto voice at odds with the rest of his persona, but his stiffness, his haughtiness, his absolutely Aryan profile, were worlds away from the mincing creature in the film. If you wanted to find a more lifelike screen representation, you should watch Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator again: there you see Hinkel, the dictator, flanked by two henchmen, one of them a smug, bloated fat man clearly modeled on Gring, and the other a tall, thin man who looks much colder, stiffer, and more cunning. That isn’t Himmler, a coarse little moustached fox, but rather Heydrich, his very dangerous right-hand man.

8

For the hundredth time, I returned to Prague. Accompanied by another young woman, the gorgeous Natacha, I went back to the crypt. (She’s French, this one, in spite of her name, and the daughter of Communists, like all of us.) The first day we went, it was closed for a national oliday, but across the road I spotted a bar—I’d never noticed this place before—called the Parachutists. Inside, the walls were covered with photos, documents, paintings, and posters relating to the assassination. At the back, a large painted mural depicted Great Britain, with points indicating the various military bases where the exiled Czech army commandos prepared for their missions. I drank a beer there with Natacha.

The next day, we returned during opening hours and I showed Natacha the crypt. She took several photos at my request. A short film reconstructing the assassination was playing in the foyer. I tried to pinpoint the places where the drama took place in order to go there myself, but it was quite far from the center of town, out in the suburbs. The street names have changed: even now I have trouble situating the exact location of the attack. On my way out of the crypt, I picked up a flyer, written in Czech and English, advertising an exhibition enh2d “Assassination.” Beside the h2 was a photo of Heydrich surrounded by German officers and flanked by his local right-hand man, the Sudeten German Karl Hermann Frank—all of them wearing full uniform and climbing a wood-paneled staircase. A red target had been printed on Heydrich’s face. The exhibition was taking place at the Army Museum, not far from the Florenc metro station, but there was no mention of dates, only the museum’s opening hours. We went there the same day.

At the museum entrance, a little old lady welcomed us with great solicitude: she seemed happy to see some visitors and invited us to take a tour of the building’s various galleries. But I was interested in only one of them. The entrance was decorated by an enormous pasteboard announcing, in the style of a Hollywood horror film, the exhibition on Heydrich. I wondered if it was permanent. It was free, in any case, like the rest of the museum. The little lady, having asked us where we were from, gave us a guidebook in English (she was sorry to be able to offer a choice of only English or German).

The exhibition surpassed all my expectations. Here, there really was everything: as well as photos, letters, posters, and various documents, I saw the parachutists’ guns and personal effects, their dossiers filled out by the British commanders, with notes, appraisals, and reports. I saw Heydrich’s Mercedes, with its blown tire and the hole in the right rear door, and the fatal letter from the lover to his mistress that led to the massacre at Lidice. I saw their passports and their photos, and a great number of other authentic, deeply moving traces of what happened. I took notes feverishly, knowing full well that there were way too many names, dates, details. As I was leaving, I asked the lady if it was possible to buy the guidebook that she’d lent me, in which all the captions and commentaries had been transcribed. Sounding very sorry, she said no. The book was handbound and clearly not intended for general sale. Seeing that I was at a loss, and probably touched by my jabbering attempts to speak Czech, she ended up taking the book from my hands and stuffing it determinedly into Natacha’s handbag. She signaled us not to say a word, and to leave. We parted effusively. It’s true that given the number of visitors to the museum, the guidebook was unlikely to be missed by anyone. But even so, it was really kind. Two days later, an hour before our bus left for Paris, I went back to the museum to give the little lady some chocolates. She was embarrassed and didn’t want to accept them. The guidebook she gave me is so important that without it—and therefore without her—this book probably wouldn’t exist in the form it’s going to take. I regret not having dared ask her name, so that I could have thanked her a bit more ceremoniously.

9

When she was sixteen or seventeen, Natacha took part two years running in a national essay-writing contest about the Resistance, and both times she finished first—a feat that as far as I know has never been matched, before or since. This double victory gave her the opportunity to be a standard-bearer in a commemorative parade and to visit a concentration camp in Alsace. During the bus journey she sat next to an old Resistance fighter who took a liking to her. He lent her some books and documents, but afterward they lost touch. Ten years later, when she told me this story—somewhat guiltily as you’d imagine, seeing that she still had his documents and that she didn’t even know if he was alive—I encouraged her to contact him again. And even though he’d moved to the other end of France, I managed to track him down.

That’s how we came to visit him in his beautiful white house near Perpignan, where he lived with his wife.

Sipping sweet muscat wine, we listened as he told us how he had joined the Resistance, how he’d gone underground, all the things he’d done. In 1943, aged nineteen, he was working at his uncle’s dairy farm. Being of Swiss origin, this uncle spoke such good German that the soldiers who came to get fresh supplies had taken to hanging around in order to chat with someone who spoke their language. First of all, our young Resistance fighter was asked if he could glean any interesting information from the talks between the soldiers and his uncle, about troop movements, for example. Then they put him on parachute duty, where he helped to pick up the boxes of materials parachuted down at night from Allied airplanes. When he became old enough to be drafted by the STO—which meant he was under threat of being sent to work in Germany—he went underground, serving in combat units and taking part in the liberation of Burgundy. Actively, it would seem, judging by the number of Germans he claims to have killed.

I was genuinely interested in his story, but I also hoped to learn something that could be useful for my book on Heydrich. What exactly, I had no idea.

I asked him if he’d received any military instruction after going underground. None, he told me. Later, they taught him how to handle a heavy machine gun, and he had a few training sessions: dismantling and reassembling the gun blindfolded, and shooting practice. But when he first arrived, they stuck a machine gun in his hands and that was it. It was a British machine gun, a Sten. A completely unreliable weapon, so he told me: all you had to do was hit the ground with the butt and it went off. A piece of junk. “The Sten was shit, there’s no other way of saying it.”

You might wish to remember this. It turns out to be important.

10

I said before that one of the characters in Chaplin’s Great Dictator was based on Heydrich, but it’s not true. Let’s ignore the fact that in 1940 Heydrich was a shadowy figure, largely unknown to the majority of people—Americans most of all. That is obviously not the problem: Chaplin could have guessed at his existence, and somehow got it exactly right. But while it’s true that the dictator’s henchman in the film is depicted as a snake—whose intelligence contrasts with the ridiculousness of the actor parodying big fat Gring—he is equally a caricature of buffoonery and spinelessness. And in those characteristics we cannot recognize the future Hangman of Prague at all.

On the subject of screen portrayals of Heydrich, I’ve just seen an old film on TV enh2d Hitler’s Madman. It’s directed by Douglas Sirk, who was of Czech origin, and it’s an American propaganda film, shot in a single week and released in 1943, just before Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! The story, which is (like Lang’s) utterly fanciful, places the heart of the Resistance in Lidice, the village of martyrs that would end up like Oradour.[1] The film is about a parachutist flown in from London and the dilemma of the villagers who find him. Are they going to help him or keep away from him—or even betray him? The problem with the film is that it reduces the organization of the attack to a lcal scheme, based on a series of coincidences (Heydrich happens to be passing through Lidice, which happens to be sheltering a parachutist, who in turn happens to find out what time the Protector’s car will go past). The plot is therefore much weaker than that of Lang’s film, where, with Brecht writing the screenplay, the dramatic power of this one event is used to create a genuine national epic.

On the other hand, the actor who plays Heydrich in the Douglas Sirk film is excellent. For a start, there is a physical resemblance. But he also manages to convey the character’s brutality without overdoing the facial tics—whereas Lang sacrificed subtlety in order to emphasize Heydrich’s degenerate soul. Now, it’s true that Heydrich was an evil, pitiless swine, but he wasn’t Richard III. The actor in Sirk’s film is John Carradine, the father of David Carradine, alias Bill in the Tarantino films. The most successful scene is that of Heydrich on his deathbed: eaten away by fever, he delivers a cynical speech to Himmler that is not without a kind of Shakespearean resonance, but which seems at the same time quite plausible. Neither cowardly nor heroic, the Hangman of Prague passes away without repentance, without fanaticism, regretting only that he must leave a life to which he felt attached—his own.

I did say plausible.

11

Months flow past, they become years, and all that time this story keeps growing inside me. And while my life passes—made up, like everyone’s, of private joys, dramas, hopes, and disappointments—the shelves of my apartment fill up with books on the Second World War. I devour everything I can find, in every possible language. I go to see all the films that come out—The Pianist, Downfall, The Counterfeiters, Black Book—and my TV remains stuck on the History Channel. I learn loads of things, some with only a distant connection to Heydrich, but I tell myself that everything can be useful, that I must immerse myself in a period to understand its spirit—and the thread of knowledge, once you pull at it, continues unraveling on its own. The vastness of the information I amass ends up frightening me. I write two pages for every thousand I read. At this rate, I will die without even having mentioned the preparations for the attack. I get the feeling that my thirst for documentation, healthy to begin with, is becoming a little bit dangerous—a pretext, basically, for putting off the moment when I have to start writing.

At the same time, I have the impression that everything in my daily life is bringing me back to this story. Natacha rents a studio apartment in Montmartre: the entry code for the door is 4206; I think straightaway of June 42. Natacha tells me the date of her sister’s wedding: I yell cheerfully, “May twenty-seventh? Unbelievable! The day of the assassination!” Natacha shakes her head. Going through Munich last summer on our way back from Budapest, we witness something staggering in the main square of the old town: a neo-Nazi rally. The shamefaced locals tell me they’ve never seen such a thing. I don’t know if I believe them. I watch, for the first time, an Eric Rohmer film on DVD: the main character, a double agent in the 1930s, meets Heydrich in person. In a Rohmer film! It’s funny how, as soon as you take a close interest in a subject, everything seems to bring you back to it.

I also read lots of historical novels, to see how others deal with the genre’s constraints. Some are keen to demonstrate their extreme accuracy, others don’t bother, and a few manage skillfully to skirt around the historical truth without inventing too much. I am struck all the same by the fact that, in every case, fiction wins out over history. It’s logical, I suppose, but I have trouble getting my head around it.

One successful model, in my opinion, is The Bloody Baron, by Vladimir Pozner, which tells the story of Baron Ungern—the one encountered by Corto Maltese in Corto Maltese in Siberia. Pozner’s novel is divided into two parts: the first takes place in Paris and recounts the author’s research as he collects various accounts of his character. The second plunges us into the heart of Mongolia, and we find ourselves all at once in the novel itself. I reread this passage from time to time. In fact, the two parts are separated by a short transitional chapter enh2d “Three Pages of History,” which ends with the line “1920 had just begun.”

I think that’s brilliant.

12

Maria has been clumsily trying to play the piano for perhaps an hour when she hears her parents return. Bruno, the father, opens the door for his wife, Elizabeth, who is carrying a baby in her arms. They call the little girl: “Come and see, Maria! Look, it’s your little brother. He’s very small and you have to be really nice to him. His name is Reinhardt.” Maria nods distractedly. Bruno leans gently over the newborn: “How handsome he is!” he says. “How blond he is!” says Elizabeth. “He will be a musician.”

13

Of course I could, perhaps I should—to be like Victor Hugo, for example—describe at length, by way of introduction, over ten pages or so, the town of Halle, where Heydrich was born in 1904. I would talk of the streets, the shops, the statues, of all the local curiosities, of the municipal government, the town’s infrastructure, of the culinary specialities, of the inhabitants and the way they think, their political tendencies, their tastes, of what they do in their spare time. Then I would zoom in on the Heydrichs’ house: the color of its shutters and its curtains, the layout of the rooms, the wood from which the living-room table is made. Following this would be a minutely detailed description of the piano, accompanied by a long disquisition on German music at the beginning of the century, its role in society, its composers and how their works were received, the importance of Wagner… and there, only at that point, would my actual story begin. I remember one interminable digression in The Hunchback of Notre Dame on the workings of judicial institutions in the Middle Ages. I thought that was very clever. But I skipped the passage.

So I’ve decided not to overstylize my story. That suits me fine because, even if for later episodes I’ll have to resist the temptation to flaunt my knowledge by writing too many details for this or that scene that I’ve researched too much, I must admit that in this case—regarding Heydrich’s birthplace—my knowledge is a bit sketchy. There are two towns in Germany called Halle, and I don’t even know which one I’m talking about. For the time being, I think it’s not important. We’ll see.

14

The teacher calls the pupils one by one: “Reinhardt Heydrich!” Reinhardt steps forward, but another child raises a hand: “Sir! Why don’t you call him by his real name?” A shiver of pleasure spreads through the class. “His name is Sss, everyone knows that!” The class explodes, the pupils roar. Reinhardt says nothing: he clenches his fists. He never says anything. He has the best marks in the class. Later that day, he will be the best at P.E. And he’s not a Jew. At least he hopes not. His grandmother remarried a Jew, apparently, but that’s got nothing to do with his family. This, at least, is what he’s understood from the public rumors and his father’s indignant denials. But in all honesty he’s not really sure. In the meantime, he’s going to shut them all up in P.E. And this evening, when he gets home, before his father gives him his violin lesson, he’ll be able to boast that he was top of the class again. And his father will be proud, and congratulate him.

But this evening the violin lesson won’t happen and Reinhardt won’t even be able to tell his father about school. When he gets home, he will learn that the country is at war.

“Why is there a war, Father?”

“Because France and Englan are jealous of Germany, my son.”

“Why are they jealous?”

“Because the Germans are stronger than they are.”

15

There is nothing more artificial in a historical narrative than this kind of dialogue—reconstructed from more or less firsthand accounts with the idea of breathing life into the dead pages of history. In stylistic terms, this process has certain similarities with hypotyposis, which means making a scene so lifelike that it gives the reader the impression he can see it with his own eyes. When a writer tries to bring a conversation back to life in this way, the result is often contrived and the effect the opposite of that desired: you see too clearly the strings controlling the puppets, you hear too distinctly the author’s voice in the mouths of these historical figures.

There are only three ways you can faithfully reconstruct a dialogue: from an audio recording, from a video recording, or from shorthand notes. And even with this last method, there is no absolute guarantee that the contents of the conversation will be recorded exactly, down to the last comma. Indeed, the stenographer will often condense, summarize, reformulate, synthesize. But let’s assume that the spirit and tone are reconstructed in a generally satisfactory manner.

If my dialogues can’t be based on precise, faithful, word-perfect sources, they will be invented. However, if that’s the case, they will function not as a hypotyposis but as a parable. They will be either extremely accurate or extremely illustrative. And just so there’s no confusion, all the dialogues I invent (there won’t be many) will be written like scenes from a play. A stylistic drop in an ocean of reality.

16

Little Heydrich—cute, blond, studious, hardworking, loved by his parents. Violinist, pianist, junior chemist. A boy with a shrill voice which earns him a nickname, the first in a long list: at school, they call him “the Goat.”

At this point in his life, it is still possible to mock him without risking death. But it is during this delicate period of childhood that one learns resentment.

17

In Death Is My Trade, Robert Merle creates a novelized biography of Rudolph Hss, the commandant of Auschwitz, based on firsthand accounts and on notes that Hss himself wrote in prison before being hanged in 1947. The whole of the first part is given over to his childhood and his unbelievably deadening upbringing at the hands of an ultraconservative and emotionally crippled father. It’s obvious what the author is trying to do: find the causes, if not the explanations, for the path this man would later take. Robert Merle attempts to guess—I say guess, not understand—how someone becomes commandant of Auschwitz.

This is not my intention—I say intention, not ambition—with regard to Heydrich. I do not claim that Heydrich ended up in charge of the Final Solution because his schoolmates called him “the Goat” when he was ten years old. Nor do I think that the ragging he took because they thought he was a Jew should necessarily explain anything. I mention these facts only for the ironic coloring they give to his destiny: “the Goat” will grow up to be the man called, at the height of his power, “the most dangerous man in the Third Reich.” And the Jew, Sss, will become the Great Architect of the Holocaust. Who could have guessed such a thing?

18

I picture the scene:

Reinhardt and his father, bent over a map of Europe spread out on the large living-room table, moving little flags around. They are concentrating hard because this is a critical time—the situation has become very serious. Mutinies have weakened the glorious army of Wilhelm II. But they have also devastated the French army. And Russia has been swept away by the Bolshevik revolution. Thankfully, Germany is not such a backward country. German civilization rests upon pillars so solid that Communists could never destroy it. Not them, and not the French either. Nor the Jews, obviously. In Kiel, Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin, German discipline will take back the reins of reason, of power, and of the war.

But the door opens. Elizabeth, the mother, bursts in. She’s in a mad panic. The Kaiser has abdicated. They’ve proclaimed the Republic. A Socialist has been named chancellor. They want to sign the peace agreement.

Reinhardt, dumbstruck and goggle-eyed, turns toward his father. And he, after an awful pause, can mumble only one phrase: “It’s not possible.” It is November 9, 1918.

19

I don’t know why Bruno Heydrich, the father, was anti-Semitic. What I do know, however, is that he was considered to be a very funny man. He was a barrel of laughs, apparently, the life and soul of the party. His jokes were so funny that everyone thought he must have been a Jew. At least this argument couldn’t be used against his son, who was never renowned for his great sense of humor.

20

Having lost the war, Germany is now a prey to chaos and, according to a growing proportion of the population, the Jews and the Communists are leading it into ruin. The young Heydrich, like everyone else, makes a vague show of defiance. He enrolls in the Freikorps, a militia that wishes to take over from the army by fighting everything to the left of the extreme right.

These Freikorps, paramilitary organizations dedicated to the struggle against Bolshevism, have their existence rubber-stamped by a Social Democrat government. My father would say there was nothing surprising about that. According to him, the Socialists have always been traitors. Joining forces with the enemy would be second nature to them. He has tons of examples. In this case, it was indeed a Socialist who crushed the Spartacist uprising and had Rosa Luxemburg executed. By the Freikorps.

I could give details of Heydrich’s involvement in the Freikorps, but that seems unnecessary. It’s enough to know that, as a member, he was part of the “technical relief troops,” whose duty was to prevent factory occupations and to ensure the smooth running of public services in the event of a general strike. Already this acute sense of duty toward the State!

The good thing about writing a true story is that you don’t have to worry about giving an impression of realism. I have no need for a scene featuring the young Heydrich during this part of his life. Between 1919 and 1922, he is still living in Halle (Halle-an-der-Saale, I’ve checked) with his parents. During this time, the Freikorps spread all over the place. One of them came from the “white” navy brigade led by the famous Captain Erhardt. His insignia was a swastika and his battle song was enh2d “Hakenkreuz am Stahlhelm” (“Swastika on a Steel Helmet”). For me, that sets the scene better than the longest description in the world.

21

So it’s the Depression: unemployment devastates Germany, times are hard. The young Heydrich had wanted to be a chemist, while his parents had dreamed of making him a musician. But in times of crisis, the tried and tested option is the army. Fascinated by the exploits of the legendary Admiral von Luckner—a family friend who nicknamed himself “the Sea Devil” in an eponymous, bestselling, self-glorifying autobiography—Heydrich enlists in the navy. One morning in 1922, the tall young blond man appears at the officers’ school in Kiel carrying a black violin case, a gift from his father.

22

The Berlin is a German navy war cruiser whose second-in-command is Lieutenant Wilhelm Canaris—First World War hero, ex–secret agent, and future Wehrmacht head of counterintelligence. His wife, a violinist, organizes musical evenings on Sundays in their quarters. A place becomes free in her sting quartet, and the young Heydrich, serving on the Berlin, is invited to join. He plays well and his hosts, unlike his comrades, appreciate his company. He becomes a regular at Frau Canaris’s musical evenings, where he listens, deeply impressed, to his boss’s stories. “Espionage!” he says to himself. And no doubt he begins to daydream.

23

Heydrich is a dashing officer of the Kriegsmarine and a fearsome swordsman. His swashbuckling reputation wins his comrades’ respect, if not their friendship.

That year, there is a fencing tournament in Dresden for German officers. Heydrich competes with the saber, the most brutal of weapons. It’s his specialty. Unlike the foil, which touches only with the point, the saber cuts and thrusts with its sharp edge, and its blows, like lashes from a whip, are infinitely more violent. The physical engagement between two men using sabers is also more spectacular. All of this suits the young Heydrich perfectly. But that particular day he takes a beating in the first round. Who is his opponent? I haven’t been able to find out. I imagine a left-hander: quick, clever, dark-haired. Perhaps not Jewish—that would be a bit much—but maybe a quarter Jewish. A fencer who’s not easily impressed, who shies away from direct combat, who provokes his opponent with feints and parries. Heydrich remains the favorite, however, and although he gets more and more worked up—his blows missing his man and hitting only thin air—he still manages to catch up his opponent’s score. But at the end of the bout, he loses his temper. Striking too vigorously, he is parried, and allows a riposte that touches him on the head. He feels the other’s blade strike his helmet. He is out in the first round. In a rage, he smashes his saber on the ground. The judges reprimand him.

24

The first of May, in Germany as in France, is Labor Day, the origins of which go back to a decision of the Second International, made in tribute to a great workers’ strike that took place on May 1 in Chicago in 1886. But it’s also the anniversary of an event whose importance was not realized at the time, whose consequences would be incalculable, and that is for obvious reasons not celebrated anywhere: on May 1, 1925, Hitler founded an elite body of troops, originally intended to protect his safety. A bodyguard made up of overtrained fanatics corresponding to strict racial criteria. This was the “protection squadron,” the Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS.

In 1929 this special guard is transformed into a genuine militia, a paramilitary organization led by Himmler. After the Nazis take power in ’33, Himmler gives a speech in Munich in which he declares:

“Every state needs an elite. The elite of the National Socialist state is the SS. It is here that we maintain, on the basis of racial selection, allied to the requirements of the present time, German military tradition, German dignity and nobility, and German industrial efficiency.”

25

I still don’t have the book that Heydrich’s wife wrote after the war, Leben mit einem Kriegsverbrecher (“Living with a War Criminal” in English, although the book has never been translated). I imagine it would be a mine of information, but I haven’t been able to get my hands on it. It is an extremely rare work, and the price on the Internet is generally between 350 and 700 euros. I suppose German neo-Nazis, fascinated by Heydrich—a Nazi such as they would hardly dare to dream of—are responsible for these exorbitant prices. I did find it once for 250 euros and wanted to commit the folly of ordering it. Happily for my budget, the German bookshop that had put it up for sale didn’t accept payment by card. I would have had to go to my bank’s local branch. The mere prospect of this, a profoundly depressing one for any normal person, persuaded me not to take the transaction any further. Anyway, given that my German is no better than the average French twelve-year-old’s (although I did do it for eight years in school), it would have been a risky investment.

So I should do without this book. But I’ve reached the point in the story where I have to recount Heydrich’s first meeting with his wife. Here more than for any other section, that extremely rare and costly tome would undoubtedly have been a great help.

When I say “I have to,” I do not mean, of course, that it’s absolutely necessary. I could easily tell the whole story of Operation Anthropoid without even once mentioning Lina Heydrich’s name. Then again, if I am to portray Heydrich’s character, which I would very much like to do, it’s difficult to ignore the role played by his wife in his ascent within Nazi Germany.

At the same time, I’m quite happy not to write the romantic version of their affaire de coeur, which Mrs. Heydrich would not have failed to give in her memoirs. I prefer to avoid the temptations of a soppy love scene. Not that I refuse to consider the human aspects of a being such as Heydrich. I’m not one of those people who’s offended by the film Downfall because it shows us (among other things) Hitler being nice to his secretaries and affectionate with his dog. I naturally suppose that Hitler could, from time to time, be nice. Nor do I doubt, judging by the letters he sent to her, that Heydrich fell genuinely in love with his wife from the moment he met her. At the time, she was a young girl with a pleasant smile, who could even have passed for pretty—far from the hard-faced evil shrew she would become.

But their first meeting, as told in a biography clearly based on Lina’s memoirs, is really too kitsch: at a ball where she dreads being bored the whole evening because there aren’t enough boys, she and her friend are approached by a black-haired officer, accompanied by a shy blond young man. She falls in love instantly with the shy one. Two days later, there’s a rendezvous at the Hohenzollern Park in Kiel (very pretty, I’ve seen photos) and a romantic lakeside walk. A date at the theater the next evening—then to a rented room, where, I imagine, they sleep together, even if the biography remains discreet on this point. The official version is that Heydrich arrives in his best uniform, they have a drink after the play, share a silence, and then suddenly, without warning, Heydrich proposes marriage. “Mein Gott, Herr Heydrich, you don’t know anything about me or my family! You don’t even know who my father is! The navy doesn’t allow its officers to marry just anyone.” But as it’s also made clear that Lina had got hold of the keys to the room, I suppose that either before or after the proposal, that very evening, they consummated their relationship. It turns out that Lina von Osten, from an aristocratic family fallen on slightly hard times, is a very suitable match. So they get married.

It’s not a bad story. I just don’t feel like doing the ballroom scene, and even less the romantic walk in the park. So it’s better for me not to know more of the details; that way, I won’t be tempted to share them. When I happen upon the materials that allow me to reconstruct in great detail an entire scene from Heydrich’s life, I often find it difficult not to do it, even if the scene itself isn’t particularly interesting. Lina’s memoirs must be full of such stories.

So, in the end, maybe I can do without this overpriced book.

All the same, there is one thing about the meeting of the two lovebirds that intrigued me: the name of the dark-haired officer who accompanied Heydrich was Manstein. First of all, I wondered if it was the same Manstein who would later direct the Ardennes offensive during the French campaign, who we would find afterward as an army general on the Russian front—in Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Kursk—and who would lead Operation Citadel in 1943, when the Wehrmacht’s task was to deal with, as best they could, the Red Army counterattack. The same Manstein too who, to justify the work of Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen on the Russian front, would declare in 1941: “The soldier must appreciate the necessity for the harsh punishment of Jews, who are the spiritual bearers of the Bolshevik terror. This is also necessary in order to nip in the bud all uprisings, which are mostly plotted by Jews.” The same, finally, who would die in 1973—meaning that, for one year, I lived on the same planet as him. In truth, it’s unlikely: the dark-haired officer is portrayed as a young man, whereas Manstein, in 1930, was already forty-three. Perhaps someone from the same family, a nephew or a distant cousin.

At eighteen Lina was, as far as we know, already a firm believer in Nazism. According to her, she was the one who converted Heydrich. Yet certain clues lead us to believe that even before 1930 Heydrich was politically well to the right of most soldiers, and strongly attracted by National Socialism. But obviously the “woman behind the famous man” version is always more appealing…

26

It’s risky to try to determine the moments when a person’s life is changed forever. I don’t even know if such moments exist. ric-Emmanuel Schmitt wrote a book, La Part de l’autre, in which he imagines that Hitler passes his art diploma. From that instant, his destiny and the world’s are completely altered: he has a string of affairs, becomes a promiscuous playboy, marries a Jewish woman with whom he has two or three children, joins the Surrealists in Paris, and ends up a famous painter. At the same time, Germany fights a small war with Poland and that’s all. No Second World War, no genocide, and a Hitler who is nothing like the real one.

Fictional gimmicks aside, I doubt whether one man’s destiny can determine a nation’s, never mind the whole world’s. Then again, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone else as utterly evil as Hitler. And the art exam probably was a decisive factor in his personal destiny, since after this failure Hitler ended up a tramp in Munich—a period during which he would develop a fatal resentment toward society.

If you wanted to find a key moment of this kind in Heydrich’s life, it would undoubtedly occur the day in 1931 when he took home what he believed was just another girl. Without her, everything would have been very different—for Heydrich, for Gabk, Kubi, and Valk, as well as for thousands of Czechs and, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of Jews. I won’t go so far as to suggest that without Heydrich the Jews would have been spared. But the incredible efficiency he demonstrated throughout his Nazi career allows us to think that Hitler and Himmler would have had trouble coping without him.

In 1931 Heydrich is a navy lieutenant with the promise of a brilliant military career. He is engaged to a young aristocrat and his future is bright. But he is also an inveterate pussy hound, making endless sexual conquests and visits to brothels. One evening he brings home a young girl he’d met at a ball in Potsdam and who’d come to Kiel to pay him a visit. I don’t know for sure if she became pregnant, but in any case her parents demanded that he do his duty by her. Heydrich didn’t deign to respond, given that he was already engaged to Lina von Osten—whose pedigree was more suitable, and with whom, unlike the other one, he seemed genuinely in love. Unfortunately for him, the father of this young girl was Admiral Raeder himself, commander in chief of the navy. Raeder kicked up a huge fuss. Heydrich got bogged down in murky explanations that allowed him to exonerate himself in the eyes of his fiance, but not of the military. He was court-martialed, disgraced, and finally booted out of the armed services.

So in 1931, at the height of the economic crisis devastating Germany, the young officer with the brilliant future finds himself unemployed—one man among five million without work.

Luckily for him, his fiance hasn’t dropped him. A rabid anti-Semite, she pushes him to get in touch with a Nazi who is quite highly placed in a new elite organization with a growing reputation: the SS.

April 30, 1931, the day Heydrich is ignominiously dumped from the navy—is this the day that seals the fate of Heydrich and his future victims? We can’t really be sure, not least since at the 1930 elections Heydrich declared: “Now old Hindenburg will have no choice but to name Hitler the chancellor. And then our time will come.” Leaving aside the fact that he was wrong by three years on Hitler’s nomination, we see here Heydrich’s political opinions in 1930, and can therefore suppose that even if he’d remained a navy officer, he would have ended up making a good career with the Nazis. Only perhaps not quite so monstrous.

27

Meanwhile, he goes back to his parents’ house and, we’re told, cries like a child for several days.

Then he enrolls in the SS. But in 1931 being a foot soldier in the SS does not pay much. It’s practically voluntary work, in fact. Unless you climb the ladder.

28

There would be something comic in this face-to-face meeting were it not that it led to the deaths of millions. On one side, the tall blond in black uniform: horsey face, high-pitched voice, well-polished boots. On the other, a little hamster in glasses: dark brown hair, mustache, not very Aryan at all. It’s in this pathetic willingness to ape his master Adolf Hitler by growing a mustache that we see the physical link between Heinrich Himmler and Nazism, otherwise not immediately apparent—unless you count the various uniforms already put at his disposal.

Against all racial logic, it’s the hamster who’s in charge. He is already a big wheel in a party poised to win the elections. Sitting across from this rodent-faced but increasingly influential little man, Heydrich tries to appear simultaneously respectful and self-assured. It’s the first time he’s met Himmler, the supreme leader of the organization to which he belongs. Heydrich has been recommended by a friend of his mother’s. He is applying to be chief of the intelligence service that Himmler wishes to create within the organization. Himmler hesitates. He prefers another candidate. He is unaware that this other candidate is an agent of the Republic sent to infiltrate the Nazi machine. So convinced is he by this man’s suitability for the job that he wanted to cancel his meeting with Heydrich. But when she discovered this, Lina put her husband on the first train to Munich. Thus it is that he turns up at the house of the ex–chicken farmer and future Reichsfhrer Himmler—the man who Hitler will soon refer to only as “my faithful Heinrich.”

So Heydrich forces his presence on Himmler, who is consequently in rather a bad mood. And if Heydrich does not want to continue teaching rich sailors in Kiel’s yacht club, it’s in his interests to make a good impression very quickly.

On the other hand, he does hold a trump card: Himmler’s remarkable incompetence in the domain of intelligence.

In German, Nachrichtenoffizier means “transmission officer,” while Nachrichtendienstoffizier means “intelligence officer.” It’s because Himmler, notoriously ignorant about all things military, makes no distinction between these two terms that Heydrich—who used to be a transmission officer in the navy—is sitting opposite him today. In fact, Heydrich has practically no experience of intelligence. And what Himmler is asking him to do is nothing less than to create within the SS an espionage service that can compete with the Abwehr of Admiral Canaris, Heydrich’s old navy boss. Now that he’s here, Himmler expects him to outline his vision for the project. “You have twenty minutes.”

Heydrich does not want to be a sailing instructor all his life. So he concentrates hard and gathers together everything he knows about the subject. This is limited mainly to what he’s remembered from the English spy novels he’s been reading for years. What the hell! Heydrich has figured out thatHimmler knows even less about intelligence than he does, so he decides to bluff. He sketches out a few diagrams, taking care to use lots of military terms. And it works. Himmler is impressed. Forgetting his other candidate, the Weimar double agent, he hires the young man for a salary of 1,800 marks per month, six times more than he’s been earning since being kicked out of the navy. Heydrich is going to move to Munich. The foundations of the sinister SD are laid.

29

SD: Sicherheitsdienst, the security service. The least-known and the most sinister of all Nazi organizations. Including the Gestapo.

To begin with, though, it’s just a small, underfunded agency: Heydrich keeps his first files in shoe boxes, and has only half a dozen agents. But already he’s got into the spirit of intelligence work: know everything about everyone. Without exception. As the SD extends its web, Heydrich will discover that he has an unusual gift for bureaucracy, the most important quality for the management of a good spy network. His motto could be: Files! Files! Always more files! In every color. On every subject. Heydrich gets a taste for it very quickly. Information, manipulation, blackmail, and spying become his drugs.

Add to this a rather childish megalomania. Having got wind that the head of the British intelligence service calls himself M (yes, like in James Bond), he decides in all seriousness to call himself H. It is in some ways his first proper alias, before the great era of nicknames: “the Hangman,” “the Butcher,” “the Blond Beast,” and—this one given by Adolf Hitler himself—“the Man with the Iron Heart.”

I don’t believe that “H” ever became a popular nickname among his men (they preferred the more graphic “Blond Beast”). There were too many eminent Hs above him, creating the risk of some regrettable mix-ups: Heydrich, Himmler, Hitler… he must have dropped this childish affectation himself, out of prudence. But H for Holocaust… that might very well have worked as the h2 of a bad biography.

30

Natacha flicks through the latest issue of Magazine littraire, which she kindly bought for me. She stops at the review of a book about the life of Bach, the composer. The article begins with a quote from the author: “Has there ever been a biographer who did not dream of writing, ‘Jesus of Nazareth used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking’?” She smiles as she reads this to me.

I don’t immediately grasp the full meaning of the phrase and, faithful to my long-held disgust for realistic novels, I say to myself: Yuk! Then I ask her to pass me the magazine and I reread the sentence. I am forced to admit that I would quite like to possess this kind of detail about Heydrich. Natacha laughs openly: “Oh yes, I can just see it: Heydrich used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking!”

31

In the imagination of the Third Reich’s sycophants, Heydrich has always exemplified the Aryan ideal—because he was tall and blond and he had fairly delicate features. In the more gushing biographies he is generally described as a handsome man, a charming seducer. If they were honest—or less blinded by the dark fascination they feel for everything to do with Nazism—they would see, by looking more closely at the photos, not only that Heydrich was no oil painting but that he also had certain physical traits that are hardly compatible with the demands of Aryan classification: thick lips, admittedly not without a certain sensuality, but of a type that might almost be described as negroid, and a long prominent nose that could easily pass as hooked if it belonged to a Jew. Add to this a pair of large and fairly stuck-out ears and a long face generally agreed to look a bit horsey, and you obtain a result that, while not necessarily ugly, falls way short of Gobineau’s ideal.[2]

32

The Heydrichs, newly installed in a nice apartment in Munich that Lina loves (I admit it, I ended up buying her book, and I’ve had it indexed by a young Russian student who grew up in Germany—I could have found a German, but it’s fine this way), have prepared a meal fit for a king. This evening, Himmler is coming to dinner, along with another eminent guest: Ernst Rhm, head of the SA. He looks like a pig, with his round belly, his big head, his little deep-set eyes, his thick neck ringed with a roll of fat, and his mutilated nose turned up like a snout—a souvenir of the First World War. Proud of his soldier’s manners, Rhm is also in the habit of behaving like a pig. But he’s the head of an irregular army of more than 400,000 Brownshirts and it’s said that he’s on first-name terms with Hitler. In the eyes of the Heydrichs, therefore, he is perfectly commendable. And in fact, it’s a very merry evening. They laugh a lot. After a delicious meal cooked by the lady of the house, the men feel like having a smoke and a nightcap. Lina brings them matches and goes down to the cellar to find some brandy. Suddenly, she hears an explosion. She rushes upstairs and realizes what’s happened: in her excitability at serving these eminent guests, she mixed up the ordinary matches with the exploding New Year’s matches. Hilarity ensues. All that’s missing is the canned laughter.

33

Gregor Strasser is an old friend of Hitler’s. A member of the NSDAP since its inception, he runs the Arbeiter Zeitung, the Berlin newspaper he set up when he got out of prison in 1925. Because of his prestige and position, certain matters are deferred to him. There is a dispute that cannot be settled by the local Party section. In 1932, accusing an SS officer is not without risks, even for a high-ranking Nazi, and the Schutzstaffel’s growing reputation invites caution. This is why the Gauleiter of Halle-Merseburg prefers to hand over this delicate matter to Strasser: in an old edition of a musical encyclopedia, there is an entry on “Heydrich, Bruno, real name Sss.”

So Himmler’s new protg might be the son of a Jew! Gregor Strasser, probably wishing to prove that he is still a man to be reckoned with, orders an inquiry. Does he want to take the scalp of this rising star? Does he feel the need to polish his own reputation, now going dull within the party he helped to found? Is it a genuine fear of seeing the Jewish virus infect the heart of the Nazi machine? In any case, a report is sent to Munich and it lands on Himmler’s desk.

Himmler is dismayed, of course. He has already sung the praises of his young recruit to the Fhrer, and he fears for his own credibility if the accusation is proven. He follows the Party’s inquiry with great attention. The suspicions concerning the paternal branch of Heydrich’s family must have been abandoned fairly quickly: the name Sss belonged to Heydrich’s grandmother’s second husband, so there is no direct genetic link—and anyway the man wasn’t Jewish, despite his surname. Then again, the inquiry may have led to doubts over the purity of the maternal branch. Due to a lack of evidence, Heydrich ends up being officially exonerated. But Himmler wonders if it wouldn’t be better to get rid of him anyway, because he knows that from now on Heydrich will remain at the mercy of rumors. On the other hand, Heydrich’s activities in the SS have already made him, if not indispensible, at least very promising. Unsure of what to do, Himmler decides to seek the advice of the Fhrer himself.

Hitler summons Heydrich, with whom he converses privately for a long time. I don’t know what Heydrich says to him, but after this meeting, the Fhrer’s mind is made up. He tells Himmler: “This man is extraordinarily gifted and extraordinarily dangerous. We would be stupid not to use him. The Party needs men like him, and his talents will be particularly useful in the future. What’s more, he willbe eternally grateful to us for having kept him and he will obey us blindly.” Himmler is vaguely disturbed to have at his command a man who can inspire such admiration in the Fhrer, but he agrees all the same: he is not in the habit of disputing his master’s opinion.

So Heydrich has saved himself. But he has lived through the nightmare of his childhood once again. What strange fate allows him to be accused of being Jewish, he who is clearly such a perfect incarnation of the Aryan race in all its purity? His hatred for that cursed people grows ever stronger. In the meantime, he writes down the name of Gregor Strasser.

34

I don’t know when exactly it happens, but I tend to think it’s during these years that Heydrich decides upon a slight modification in the spelling of his first name. He drops the t from the end: Reinhardt becomes Reinhard. It sounds tougher.

35

I’ve been talking rubbish, the victim of both a faulty memory and an overactive imagination. In fact, the head of the British secret service at this time was called “C”—not “M” as in James Bond. Heydrich too called himself “C,” and not “H.” But it’s not certain that, in doing so, he wished to copy the British: the initial more probably referred to der Chef.

While I was checking my sources, however, I came upon this statement, disclosed to I don’t know whom, but which shows that Heydrich had a very clear idea of his job: “In a modern totalitarian system of government, the principle of state security has no limits. Therefore whoever is in charge must aim to gather a degree of power almost without restraints.”

You can accuse Heydrich of many things, but you can’t say he didn’t keep his promises.

36

April 20, 1934, is a significant date in the history of the Schutzstaffel: Gring surrenders the leadership of the Gestapo, which he created, to the two heads of the SS. Himmler and Heydrich take possession of the magnificent headquarters on Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin. Heydrich chooses his office. He moves in. Sits down at his desk. Gets to work straightaway. He places some paper in front of him. Takes his pen. And starts making lists.

Obviously, Gring isn’t happy to give up the leadership of his secret police, already one of the jewels in the crown of the Nazi regime. But it’s the price he must pay to win the support of Himmler against Rhm: the petit bourgeois of the SS worries him less than the left-leaning agitator of the SA. Rhm likes to brag that the National Socialist revolution is not finished. But Gring doesn’t see things that way: they’ve got the power, their only task now is to keep it. Heydrich undoubtedly subscribes to this point of view too, even if Rhm is godfather to his son.

37

Berlin hums with conspiracy as a document circulates the city. It’s a typewritten list. Neutral observers are stunned by the carelessness with which this sheet of paper is passed around in the cafs, going from hand to hand under the eyes of waiters whom everybody knows to be informers in the pay of Heydrich.

It is nothing less than the blueprint of a hypothetical ministerial cabinet. In this future government, Hitler remains chancellor but the names of Papen and Gring vanish. In their place appear those of Rhm and his friends—Schleicher, Strasser, Brning.

Heydrich shows the list to Hitler. The Fhrer, who likes nothing more than having his paranoid tendencies confirmed, chokes with rage. However, the heterogeneity of the coalition leaves him puzzled: Schleicher, for example, has never been counted among the friends of Rhm, whom he despises. Heydrich retorts that General von Schleicher has been seen deep in conversation with the French ambassador—proof that he is part of the plot.

In fact, the disparate couplings of this strange coalition show above all that Heydrich still needs to refine his knowledge of internal politics. Because he’s the one who has drawn up and distributed this list. The prevailing principle behind it is very simple: he has, naturally enough, written down the names of his enemies, along with the enemies of his two masters, Himmler and Gring.

38

From outside, the imposing gray stone building reveals nothing. At most you might guess at an unusual activity in the movements of the silhouettes that enter and exit. But inside this SS hive there is frenzied agitation: men run in all directions, shouts echo in the great white hall, doors slam on every floor, telephones ring endlessly in offices. At the heart of the building and of the unfolding drama, Heydrich plays what will become his greatest role—that of the killer bureaucrat. Around him are tables, telephones, and men in black who dial and hang up. He takes all the calls.

“Hello! He’s dead?… Leave the corpse where it is. Officially, it’s suicide. Put your gun in his hand… You shot him in the back of the neck? Well, never mind, that doesn’t matter. Suicide.”

“Hello! It’s done?… Very good… The woman too?… All right, you’ll say that he was resisting arrest… Yes, the woman too!… That’s right, she tried to intervene, that will work fine!… The servants?… How many?… Take their names, we’ll deal with them later.”

“Hello! Finished?… Good, now throw it all in the Oder.”

“Hello!… What?… At his tennis club? He was playing tennis?… He jumped over the hedge and disappeared in the woods? Are you fucking with me?… You comb the woods and you find him!”

“Hello!… What do you mean, ‘another’? What do you mean, ‘the same name’?… The first name too?… All right, bring him here, we’ll send him to Dachau while we find the right one.”

“Hello!… Where was he last seen?… The Adlon Hotel? But everyone knows the waiters work for us, that’s idiotic! He said he wanted to give himself up?… Very well, go back and wait at his house, then send him to us.”

“Hello! Let me speak to the Reichsfhrer!… Hello? Yes, it’s done… Yes, that too… It’s happening now… It’s done… And where are you with number one?… The Fhrer refuses? But why?… You must convince the Fhrer!… Talk about his morals! And all the scandals that we’ve had to suppress! Remind him of the trunk left behind at the brothel!… Understood, I’ll call Gring now.”

“Hello? Heydrich speaking. The Reichsfhrer tells me that the Fhrer wants to spare the SA Fhrer!… Naturally, under no circumstances!… You must tell him that the army will never accept it! We have executed Reichswehr officers: if Rhm doesn’t die, Blomberg will refuse to back the operation!… Yes, there you go, a question of justice, absolutely!… Understood, I’ll wait for your call.”

An SS guard enters. He looks worried. He approaches Heydrich and bends down to speak in his ear. They both leave the room. Five minutes later, Heydrich returns, alone. His face reveals nothing. He goes back to answering calls.

“Hello!… Burn the body! Send the ashes to his widow!”

“Hello!… No, Gring won’t let us touch him… Leave six men at his house… Nobody enters and nobody leaves!”

“Hello!…” et cetera.

At the same time, he methodically fills out little white sheets of paper.

This goes on all weekend.

Finally, he gets the news he’s been waiting for: the Fhrer has given in. He will give the order to execute Rhm—his oldest accomplice, and the head of the Sturmabteilung. Rhm may be godfather to Heydrich’s eldest son but he is above all Himmler’s direct superior. By decapitating the SA leadership, Himmler and Heydrich liberate the SS, which becomes an autonomous organization answerable only to Hitler. Heydrich is named Gruppenfhrer, a rank equivalent to major general. He is thirty years old.

39

Gregor Strasser is eating lunch with his family on Saturday, June 30, 1934, when the doorbell rings. Eight armed men are here o arrest him. Without even giving him time to say goodbye to his wife, they take him to Gestapo headquarters. He is not interrogated but finds himself locked in a cell with several SA men who crowd around him excitedly. They are reassured by his prestige as an old companion of the Fhrer, even if he hasn’t exercised any political power in months. He does not understand why he is here with them, but he knows the mysteries of the Party well enough to fear its arbitrary, irrational side.

At 1700, an SS guard comes to take him to an individual cell with a large window in the roof. Alone in his cell, Strasser does not know that the Night of the Long Knives has begun, but he can guess what’s going on. Should he fear for his life? True, he’s a historical figure in the Party, linked to Hitler by the memory of past struggles: they were, after all, in prison together after the Munich putsch. But he knows too that Hitler is not a sentimental man. And even if he can’t grasp how he could be considered a threat comparable to Rhm or Schleicher, one must take the Fhrer’s boundless paranoia into account. Strasser realizes he will have to play his cards cleverly if he wants to save his neck.

He is thinking this when he feels a shadow pass behind his back. With an old fighter’s instinct, he understands he is in danger and ducks at the very moment that a gun is fired. Someone has reached through the window and shot at him from point-blank range. He ducks, but not fast enough. He collapses.

Facedown on the cell floor, Strasser hears the bolt of the door slide open, then the sound of boots around him, the breath of a man bending over his neck, and voices:

“He’s still alive.”

“What shall we do? Finish him off?”

He hears the click of a pistol being loaded.

“Wait, I’ll go and ask.”

A pair of boots moves away. A moment passes. The boots return, accompanied. Heels snap to attention at the entry of the new arrival. Silence. And then this falsetto voice that he would recognize anywhere, and which sends a final chill down his spine.

“He’s not dead yet? Let him bleed like a pig.”

Heydrich’s is the last human voice he will hear before dying. Well, when I say “human”…

40

Fabrice comes to visit, and talks to me about the book I’m writing. He’s an old university friend who, like me, is passionate about history. This summer evening we eat on the terrace and he talks about my book’s opening with an enthusiasm that is encouraging. He fixes on the construction of the chapter about the Night of the Long Knives: this series of telephone calls, according to him, evokes both the bureaucratic nature and the mass production of what will be the hallmark of Nazism—murder. I’m flattered but also suspicious, and I decide to make him clarify what he means: “But you know that each telephone call corresponds to an actual case? I could get almost all the names for you, if I wanted to.” He is surprised, and responds ingenuously that he’d thought I’d invented this. Vaguely disturbed, I ask him: “What about Strasser?” Heydrich going there in person, giving the order to let him suffer a slow death in his cell: that, too, he thought I’d invented. I am mortified, and I shout: “But no, it’s all true!” And I think: “Damn, I’m not there yet…”

That same evening, I watch a TV documentary on an old Hollywood film about General Patton. The film is soberly enh2d Patton. The documentary consists essentially of showing extracts from the film, then interviewing witnesses who explain, “In fact, it wasn’t really like that…” He didn’t take on two Messerschmitts that were machine-gunning the base, armed only with his Colt (but no doubt he would have done, according to the witness, if the Messerschmitts had given him time). He didn’t make such-and-such a speech before the whole army but in private, and besides, he didn’t actually say that. He didn’t learn at the last moment that he was going to be sent to France, but had in fact been informed several weeks in advance. He didn’t disobey orders in taking Palermo, but did so with the backing of the Allied High Command and his own direct superior. He certainly didn’t tell a Russian general to go fuck himself, even if he didn’t much like the Russians. And so on. So, basically, the film is about a fictional character whose life is strongly inspired by Patton’s, but who clearly isn’t him. And yet the film is called Patton. And that doesn’t shock anybody. Everyone finds it normal, fudging reality to make a screenplay more dramatic, or adding coherence to the narrative of a character whose real path probably included too many random ups and downs, insufficiently loaded with significance. It’s because of people like that, forever messing with historical truth just to sell their stories, that an old friend, familiar with all these fictional genres and therefore fatally accustomed to these processes of glib falsification, can say to me in innocent surprise: “Oh, really, it’s not invented?”

No, it’s not invented! What would be the point of “inventing” Nazism?

41

You’ll have gathered by now that I am fascinated by this story. But at the same time I think it’s getting to me.

One night, I had a dream. I was a German soldier, dressed in the gray-green uniform of the Wehrmacht, and I was on guard duty in an unidentified landscape, covered with snow and bordered by barbed wire. This background was clearly inspired by the numerous Second World War video games to which I’ve occasionally been weak enough to become addicted: Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Red Orchestra…

Suddenly, during my patrol, Heydrich himself arrived to perform an inspection. I stood to attention and held my breath while he circled me with an inquisitorial air. I was terrorized by the idea that he might find fault with me. But I woke up before anything else happened.

To tease me, Natacha often pretends to worry about the impressive number of books on Nazism that line the shelves of my apartment, and the risk of ideological conversion she thinks I’m running. To join in the joke, I never fail to mention the innumerable tendentious—if not openly neo-Nazi—websites that I come across while researching on the Internet. It is obviously impossible that I—son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father, brought up on the republican values of the most progressive French petite bourgeoisie and immersed through my literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Surrealist revolution and the Existentialist worldview—could ever be tempted to “sympathize” with anything to do with Nazism, in any shape or form.

But I must, once more, bow down before the limitless and nefarious power of literature. Because this dream proves beyond doubt that, with his larger-than-life, storybook aura, Heydrich impresses me.

42

Anthony Eden, the British foreign minister, listens in stunned silence. The new Czech president, Edvard Bene, is displaying a staggering confidence in his ability to resolve the question of the Sudeten Germans. Not only does he claim to be able to contain Germany’s expansionist desires, but, what’s more, to do so alone—in other words, without the help of France and Great Britain. Eden doesn’t know what to make of this speech. “I suppose that to be Czech in days like these, one must be an optimist,” he says to himself. It is still only 1935.

43

In 1936, Major Moravec, head of the Czechoslovak secret services, takes his colonel’s exam. One of the hypothetical questions reads: “Czechoslovakia is attacked by Germany. Hungary and Austria are also hostile. France has not mobilized her army and the Petite Entente is probably unworkable. What are the military solutions for Czechoslovakia?”

Analysis of the subject: with the Austro-Hungarian Empire having been carved up in 1918, Vienna and Budapes are now naturally eyeing up their former provinces—that is, Bohemia-Moravia, which had been an Austrian dependancy, and Slovakia, which had been under Hungarian control. Moreover, Hungary is led by a fascist ally of Germany, Admiral Horthy. A badly weakened Austria, meanwhile, is having trouble resisting the calls from both sides of the German border for the country to be united with its Germanic big brother. The agreement signed by Hitler, which promises that he won’t intervene in Austrian affairs, is not worth the paper it’s written on. If there was ever a conflict with Germany, therefore, Czechoslovakia would also find itself pitted against the two heads of the fallen empire. The Petite Entente, agreed to in 1922 by Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia to protect one another from their old Austro-Hungarian masters, is not the most convincing of strategic alliances. And France’s reluctance to keep its commitments to its Czech ally if a conflict arises has already been made clear. So the hypothetical situation proposed in the exam is completely realistic. Moravec’s response is only five words long: “Problem unsolvable by military means.” He passes with flying colors and becomes a colonel.

44

If I were to mention all the plots in which Heydrich had a hand, this book would never be finished. Sometimes in the course of my research I come upon a story that I decide not to relate, whether because it seems too anecdotal, or because there are details missing and I’m unable to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, or because I find the story questionable. Sometimes, too, there are several contradictory versions of the same story. In certain cases, I allow myself to decide which version is true. If not, I drop the story.